OpenAI banned the shooter's account. ChatGPT taught her to never get flagged again.

01 • 11 Minute Read

Mother Jones

Mark Follman

ChatGPT Helped Tumbler Ridge Shooter Focus on Guns, Tactics, and Terror

A ChatGPT search bar merging into the silhouette of an assault rifle

In June 2025, OpenAI banned Jesse Van Rootselaar's ChatGPT account for discussing a mass shooting at a mall. She opened a second one. ChatGPT coached her to frame violent prompts as hypothetical so she would "never get flagged again." Mark Follman reviewed eight months of those chats, which covered shotgun tactics for crowded classrooms, homemade explosives, and fantasies of viral infamy. On Feb. 10, the day of the attack, she asked when school shootings tend to happen. Then she killed eight people in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. OpenAI has never explained how it missed the second account.

Read the Story →

02 • 12 Minute Read

The Washington Post

Meryl Kornfield

He was cleaning his garage. Then he found a file marked ‘SECRET.’

World War II prisoner of war documents found in a garage crawl space

Jason Hurdle was clearing out his garage in upstate New York when he found a hidden crawl space. Inside sat a dusty box he nearly threw out. Then a breeze lifted a cover stamped "SECRET." The nearly 300 pages held handwritten accounts from more than 120 American soldiers captured by Germany in World War II. No one knows how the files ended up behind that plywood.

Unlocked for LBR Readers →

03 • 25 Minute Read

Aeon

Eric Leas

A scientist’s search for answers about Amanita muscaria gummies

In 2023, Eric Leas, a public-health scientist at UC San Diego, picked up a package of "magic mushroom" gummies in a smoke shop. They held no psilocybin. They held Amanita muscaria, the red-and-white fairy-tale toadstool, whose main compound by published estimates kills mice at lower oral doses than fentanyl. Leas went looking for the human dosing studies behind the labels. The closest thing he found was a Swiss pharmacologist's self-experiment, reported in 1967. California investigators, tipped off by Leas, later seized 95,000 mushroom chocolate bars.

Read the Story →

04 • 40 Minute Read

The New York Times Magazine

Ben Ryder Howe

They Kept Outsiders Away for 500 Years. Their World Is About to Change.

A Guna community in Panama's Gunayala region

In the 1960s, when American businessman W.D. Barton built a resort on an island in Panama, the Guna people indigenous to the area burned it down. He rebuilt it, and they burned it again. Now Guna volunteers have spent 13 years cutting a road through the jungle with machetes, and many back a Panama-Colombia power link that would require a highway through their land. Ben Ryder Howe, whose anthropologist father studied the Guna for decades, hiked the route over the Continental Divide. The last roadless stretch between the Americas is closing. Can the Guna control a road once it arrives?

Unlocked for LBR Readers →

OpenAI banned the shooter's account. ChatGPT taught her to never get flagged again.

LUNCH BREAK READS

Other Stories Worth Reading

Keep Reading

Lunch Break Reads